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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Neutrino08 - GSI

It turns out that the GSI poster did in fact belong to Manfred Lindner, who gave a 15 minute talk on the anomaly late Friday. As indicated by the poster, he wanted to stress to theorists the silliness of rushing to publish explanations for rumoured oscillations, which it turns out cannot have anything to do (directly) with neutrino oscillations.

GSI has the ability to see single ions via Schottky noise detection, after creating monoisotopic beams. The systems in question are decays of 140Pr58+ to Ce and 142Pm60+ to Nd. On observing the decays over a period of about 80 seconds, they find superimposed oscillations (at very high $\sigma$) in the count rate of $T = 7$ sec in both cases. Also note that the phases are different in each case, whereas one might expect them to be the same if set at $t = 0$ by some mechanism. They say the oscillations cannot be due to neutrino oscillations, because the capture process should be independent of neutrino mixing.

So what is it? There was no clear answer given, but suggestions include a tiny splitting in the mother system, which sounds reasonable. A new run to clarify the situation should be made this fall.